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Moses Sumney drops ‘Rank and File’ + a new EP

‘Black in Deep Red, 2014’ is the follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut album

By:Matthew Forbes / 14 August 2018

LA-based singer/songwriter Moses Sumney has just followed up his 2017 debut album with a three-track EP titled ‘Black in Deep Red, 2014’. Prior to this release, Sumney shared the EP’s lead single.

The EP delves further into the world of politics than Sumney’s debut album, with the specific inspiration behind the release stemming from the singer’s experience attending a protest following the grand jury decision to acquit the officer who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in the fall of 2014. “I felt like a camouflaged outsider at the protest, like an anthropologist performing a study amongst his own kind,” Sumney says.“I took to the mountains soon after that and wrote these songs, wondering if power was a transferable device that could change hands through the vocalizing of unrest.” The title of the EP stems from a 1957 Mark Rothko paining of the same name (bar the year).

Since self-releasing a cassette EP back in 2014, Moses Sumney has become one of the most exciting figures to emerge into the music scene this decade. His haunting voice, deeply personal lyricism and genre-transcending music has earned him recognition from notable musicians such as Sufjan Stevens, who had Sumney join him to perform at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, as well as significant praise from publications such as NPR, Pitchfork and Rolling Stone – all of which listed his debut album ‘Aromanticism’ as one of the best albums of 2017. The singer played to a sold out Sydney Opera House earlier this year following his performance at Laneway Festival, and has continued to bring his acclaimed live show to several premiere music festivals across the globe, including Bonnaroo and Montreux Jazz, in recent months.